"Jewish Violence in the Middle Ages: Fantasies and Realities"
A talk by Bar Ilan University senior lecturer Elliott Horowitz. The history of Jewish liturgy contains various angry prayers expressing hopes for the downfall of Christendom. Previous scholarship has either downplayed them or seen them as part of a legacy of Jewish ressentiment rather than understanding them as drawing upon of a legacy of violence. This seminar will focus on the liturgy for two periods of the year among the Jews of early medieval Palestine and Italy and high medieval Franco-Germany, the High Holy Days and the season of Purim, and trace the implications of acknowledging and addressing the anti-Christian elements that survive in Jewish liturgy through the present.
Elliott Horowitz was born in New York City and educated at Princeton and Yale. He has taught in Israel since 1982, first at Ben Gurion University and then in the Dept of Jewish History at Bar Ilan University. He is co-editor of the Jewish Quarterly Review and author of Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence (Princeton University Press, 2006; paperback, 2008) and many articles on Jewish social and cultural history.
Co-sponsored by the Institute for Comparative and International Studies
Friday, September 12th
9:30-11:00 a.m.
Candler Library Room 212
(JS Seminar Room)
“How was spring trimmed at the apple gardens”: Abba Kovner sings the Holocaust
A talk by Ofra Yeglin, Assistant Professor, Emory University, Department of Middle East and South Asian Studies. Abba Kovner (1919-1987) was a leftist art student when he famously exhorted his fellow Jews in the Vilna ghetto to take up arms and not to go as sheep to the slaughter. A partisan commander and one of the founders of the Berihah (illegal emigration), he made his way back to Europe in 1945 armed with enough poison to kill six million Germans; he went on to become the officer of cultural activities during the Israeli war of Independence (1948), a central witness at the Eichmann trail (1961), and the creator of “The Diaspora House” (Beth Hatefutsoth), the museum of the Jewish people (1978), which established an entirely new concept of what a Jewish museum should be.
Kovner is also one of Israel's most profound and original poets. His lifetime endeavor to “sing the Holocaust” in ten lengthy poems encompasses all available genres, bringing the essence of poetic language “down” to the earth of history with compellingly surprising insight. In the era of the loss and disappearance of intimate personal Holocaust experiences and the decline of collective historical accounts and ceremonies—and after we have listened carefully to Paul Celan's poetry in German—it is time to listen to Kovner's Hebrew song of testimony.
Co-sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature
Friday, October 10th
9:30-11:00 a.m.
Candler Library Room 212 (JS Seminar Room)
"What you are" or "what's in your heart"? Competing definitions of religion among intermarried couples"
A talk by Graduate Division of Religion graduate student Jennifer Thompson, with response by Religion professor Laurie Patton. In intermarried couples, two different definitions of religion simultaneously govern the family's religious practices, conceptions of Jewishness, and relationship to the Jewish community. In my ethnographic research, conducted over four years in Atlanta, I found that Christian spouses define religion in American Protestant terms, rejecting hierarchy and valuing individualism, moral improvement, and religious tolerance. They often enthusiastically participate in, even spearhead, Jewish ritual in their families because it "touches their hearts." They see religion as essentially universal because it is individual. As a central cultural influence in American culture and history, Protestantism influences Catholic intermarried spouses' language as well, emphasizing faith and emotional experience and a personal relationship with God. But in contrast to the Christian spouses' definition of religion, Jewish spouses define religion implicitly in both this Protestant way and as "what you are": "You do the traditions because that's what you are, not because of what you believe," said one intermarried Jewish woman. Jewish and Protestant views of religion coexist uneasily within intermarried families, in part because they exist within critical discourses in the American Jewish community about intermarriage. These discourses draw on both definitions of religion, with a halakhic definition of Jewishness that conflicts with the dominant Protestant conception of religion in America. Intermarried couples are well aware of these discourses and respond to them in their own lives even though the discourses rarely take into account their responses.
Jennifer Thompson is a Ph.D. candidate in the Ethics and Society program of the Graduate Division of Religion. Her ethnographic dissertation analyzes the experiences of intermarried Jewish-Christian couples in Atlanta and the American Jewish discourses on intermarriage. She has been a Graduate Student Fellow at the Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life, a Sloan Center for Working Families, since 2005. She holds an M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School (2000) and a B.A. in English and American Literature from Brandeis University (1998).
Cosponsored by the Graduate Division of Religion (GDR)
Friday, October 24th
9:30-11:00 a.m.
Candler Library Room 212 (JS Seminar Room)
How Danayda is Becoming Dvorah: A Cuban Journey to Israel
A talk by Anthropology professor Ruth Behar with response by Religion department professor Joyce Flueckinger. Globalization seduces women. It makes them dream of other places, far away, where they feel certain they will find the happiness that eludes them at home. Eighteen-year-old Danayda arrived in Beersheva in November, 2007. She is part of a small community of Cubans of Jewish heritage who are remaking their lives in Israel. As a black Cuban woman, Danayda faces race, class, and cultural prejudices daily. But there is no turning back. And so she concentrates on becoming Dvorah, a woman who didn’t exist in Cuba.
Ruth Behar was born in Havana, Cuba and grew up in New York City. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Award, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Distinguished Alumna Award from Wesleyan University. She has worked as a cultural anthropologist in Spain, Mexico, and Cuba. Her books include The Presence of the Past in a Spanish Village, Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story, and The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart. Her recent book, An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba, is a blend of memoir, ethnography, and photography that tells the story of her quest to get to know the Jewish community that remains on the island she left as a child. She is also co-editor of Women Writing Culture, and editor of Bridges to Cuba, a pioneering forum of culture and art by Cubans on the island and in the diaspora. Her latest anthology is The Portable Island: Cubans at Home in the World, co-edited with Lucía Suárez. In addition to scholarly work, she writes essays, poetry, and fiction, which can be found in King David’s Harp: Autobiographical Essays by Jewish Latin American Writers; Telling Stories: An Anthology for Writers; Burnt Sugar/Caña Quemada: Contemporary Cuban Poetry in English and Spanish; Sephardic American Voices: Two Hundred Years of a Literary Legacy; and Little Havana Blues: A Cuban-American Literature Anthology. Her work as a filmmaker led her to write, direct, and produce Adio Kerida/Goodbye Dear Love: A Cuban Sephardic Journey, a feature-length documentary distributed by Women Make Movies, which has been shown around the world. She is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Further information about her work is available on her web site: www.ruthbehar.com.
November 13-14th, 2008
Time & Place: TBA
E-mail
to subscribe to our events mailing list!
